Presidential Power

Irascible Democrat: There’s something I’ve been dying to ask you, since your view of the current President has softened, while down-home vitriol at him seems to be ever-increasing. Plus, there was his Superman joke during the campaign. So what's your take on his presidency so far?

Superman: I’m a reporter, first and foremost, so I have to take umbrage a bit with your phrasing. There are people who are angry with the President, and some of them even have a point, but if you’re specifically bringing up the Tea Parties, or the people shouting at politicians who try to speak about health care or climate change- they’re in an obstructionist minority.

But again, some of them do have a point. A wide majority of people favor health care reform. When you ask them about any specific plan on any specific timeline, support drops to a little below half. I think the problem, particularly with health care, is that the public like their health circumstances today, and they're scared of things changing. But the reality is their circumstances are constantly changing, evolving. If current trends continue, without reform costs will continue to rise, and that will mean that some people will have to change to cheaper insurance, others will lose coverage entirely. So people want to freeze their insurance as it stands today- but that isn't really possible. The public is just scared, right now, which I think is largely the fault of that obstructionist minority I mentioned, but the administration hasn't effectively countered it, either.

ID: But overall, how do you rate the President?

S: I’m not going to give him a grade, or a thumbs up or down. But I’ll say one thing for the man and the administration he's built, that I think encompasses most of my feelings on the subject: he’s trying. Whatever your political feelings on what he’s attempting to do, whatever your favorite hobby horse, he’s attempting to do something about it. That was always the most damning charge against Bush, and Luthor after him, that they were terribly passive. They wanted to let the market sort things out, let someone else figure out a way to profit when things went wrong, rather than getting in with the resources at their disposal to help. And Obama, and the congressional leadership, they’re trying. They’re fighting the good fight.

Sometimes, with all the pies they have their hands in, things get necessarily back-burnered, but I think it’s unreasonable to think even a great president would be able to address every standing question in the nation at the same time.

Take Darfur. The League came out in a joint statement with President Bush's administration, declaring our belief that what was taking place in Darfur amounted to genocide. We also filed an amicus brief of our research efforts for the ICC. Now under international law, Bush was supposed to act to stop the genocide in Darfur once it was determined to be occurring. But Bush, and Luthor after him, seemed content with that, assuming someone else would deal with it effectively.

ID: Given your own non-interventionist approach, isn't that a bit of the pot calling the kettle black?

S: The difference is slight, I'll grant you, but huge. First, the League is a collection of people from different nationalities, and are not signatories nor parties to the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. The CPPCG actually states in part that signatory nations have a responsibility to act against a genocide. Where the League lacks the mandate and the infrastructure, the U.S. does not. The U.S. under either Bush or Luthor could have assembled another coalition. Hell, the US could have devoted no resources whatsoever, and just called in Captain Atom, one of the few Captains in our circles who actually holds the rank legitimately- in the Air Force, specifically.

ID: Okay, so what's the difference then in current policy?

S: Admittedly, part of the change is that now there's a UN force in place, there's a warrant for genocide-related crimes out for [Sudanese President Omar al] Bashir from the ICC. But despite the fact that Darfur is at least in the process of making progress, he's still talking about it. And he's dispatched specific envoys tasked with aiding the situation. I think he could do more. I think, in private at least, he should mention Captain Atom, and the fact that one single air raid through the country could destroy upwards of 80% of the military infrastructure, and probably deliver Bashir into the waiting hands of the ICC. I think maybe Obama doesn't want to push that too hard, where he's using fear and threats as a proxy for diplomacy, and I think Darfur is one of those things that has been back-burnered in favor of pressing domestic concerns- but I think it's on his to-do list, whereas with Luthor and Bush I don't think it even registered as something they should think about acting on.

ID: Okay, what about GM?

S: I think, given the lousy set of circumstances, he’s done well enough. After all, it was the previous administration that first loaned GM billions of dollars. So when it came to choosing between letting that “investment” die- and letting all those jobs disappear- or sinking more capital into the company, I don’t think there was a good choice- so I think they tried to be practical.

ID: What about people upset about the lack of movement on “Don't ask, don't tell.”

S: I think it's still on the President's radar- it's just a difficult policy to replace with other things on the table. I think, also, he's a bit gunshy because of what happened to Clinton that originally led to the compromise that is “Don't ask.” I think it's again Obama choosing some priorities over others.

ID: Are you an apologist for the President?

S: I'm not an apologist for anyone, except occasionally myself- and even then, only when I feel I've genuinely erred. Besides which, these are your questions, which means either you were wanting me to fall the way I did, the other way, or, I suppose if you're that rare kind of genuinely curious reporter, then you were just interested in which way I eventually would fall.

ID: Okay, but if the next election were tomorrow, would you vote to reelect him?

S: I don't know- that depends on my options. If all the Republicans are offering is Palin, Romney, Huckabee, then I'd take anyone else with a pulse and a synapse or two- which would definitely include the President. If Al Gore decides to challenge as the father of a new independent party, running on a platform of genuine environmental revolution- things like mandating recyclable containers for all food products- then I don't know. I always really liked the title “man of tomorrow,” so if there were an election then, I hope I'd be looking towards the future, and who was going to get us to the best one possible.

We’ll be trying to bring you a new section of the interview every Tuesday. Some of the questions have already been prepared by the interviewer, but to ask Superman a question, leave a comment or send an email to DeathofSuperman@gmail.com.

Justice

Illusionary Declaration: You brought up Darfur last week. So we need to talk about that. You ostensibly head the Justice League, the most powerful non-profit, non-governmental-organization in existence. You could, for all intents and purposes, tear Bashir from his bed right this second and hand-deliver him to The Hague. I want to ignore the peace-before-justice argument for a moment, since Darfur is just an example- there’s currently problems in Myanmar, Tibet, Somalia- a lot of places, really, with recurring, not just crisis-of-the-week type problems that have gone unaddressed by yourself and your bespandexed colleagues. Why hasn’t the League intervened?

Superman: That’s probably the best question you’ve ever asked, and it takes us back to the very start of the League. I’ll start by saying when we started, we were all naïve. I’d been in costume less than a year, so had most of us up to that point. We averted a White Martian invasion with the help of J’onn J’onnz

ID: The Martian Manhunter

S: and we sort of realized that there were some things we couldn’t do on our own. Some of us had worked together previously before, but this was something on a scale none of us had seen before, and it really taught us all that there was just a different type of threat out there than we’d previously been exposed to.

It started, for me, at least, with a conversation with J’onn. As an alien living amongst humans, I sort of took it upon myself to help him find a place, get settled, develop his own life, and we were having lunch in a very 50s diner. J’onn was talking sort of matter-of-factly about an early warning system; he kind of took it for granted that we already were connected to one another in a way that would allow us to function like a group. And we started to develop the idea as we waited for milkshakes.

He and I were planning on starting a push with the others who had helped avert the invasion, and we were going to have lunch again on Sunday to hash out details of that, and I remember Diana called on Saturday. Her background was in politics, diplomacy- after all, she was primarily an ambassador- and she’d already been networking with Flash, Green Lantern. She said she’d probably have called sooner, but she’d had to go to Atlantis three times to convince Aquaman- though I’ve always sort of assumed, and Diana’s always refused to deny, that he only kept her coming back to get in her pants- though I suppose technically her battlesuit doesn’t include pants.

She’d covered some of the details, at least in theory, that J’onn and I had missed, and of course, there was only one person left to talk to, Bruce. We spent twenty minutes trying to figure out if he’d even be interested, and then which of us had the most chance of convincing him. I thought she could flirt him into it; she seemed to be under the impression that he and I shared some kind of bond. In the end, well, Diana was very persuasive- she was a hell of an ambassador, even in those days, so I made the call. He was cold. “I expected you to call an hour ago. It’s a stupid idea. I’m sure you’ve already come up with a ridiculous name for it.” He paused. “I’ll work with you as a consultant, to limit the damage the rest of you can do.”

A couple of weeks later we set up a summit, and we set out to make ground rules. We actually wanted to format it off of the United Nations, with members voting on rules and resolutions- taking the time to weight the consequences of intervening in situations versus just rushing in and possibly making situations worse.

And it was Bruce who brought up politics, asking one of those questions that sort of had an answer hidden inside it- but he asked us about Northern Ireland. This was before the Belfast Agreement. At first, there was mostly support for the British point of view, until it was pointed out that elements of the revolutionary groups, while resorting to terrorist methods, were spiritually replaying the American revolutionary struggle. Bruce added a little fuel to the fire by comparing that conflict with Israel and the Palestinians, which further polarized the discussion.

It became so heated that at one point it looked like we were going to come to blows, and J’onn demanded we take a time out for lunch. We split up into basically pro British and Irish groups for lunch, and over the course of eating, we came to the realization that I think Bruce was prodding us towards- that when there wasn’t a clear-cut answer, we needed to steer clear. It wasn’t, and hasn’t, been a perfect solution, but what it taught us was that there are simply some questions that needed to be answered by the people involved.

After lunch, a little more seasoned, I think, we turned to the subject of imposing peace. It was true that we could impose peace on Israel, but at the cost of becoming dictators- and under a superhuman dictatorship –even more so than under a normal human dictatorship- it would be impossible for the democratic reforms necessary for a lasting peace to form. We felt really productive during the second half of the day, and we thought we were closing in on something concrete until Bruce stood up and lectured all of us on playing a self-congratulatory game of model UN. And aggravating as he was, he was right. We’d drawn up bylaws in a day; we were prepared to change the world on a whim.

He didn’t show up for the second day of our summit, but he’d cast a shadow over our talks, and basically all of our headier plans fell apart, so that when he showed up again in the last few hours of the third day, we were working with a much smaller, much less reaching League than the one we’d sort of been dreaming of on that first day. To this day I don’t know how much of that was calculation on his part, and how much of it was a genuine frustration at what he saw as a superhuman superpower forming with too little forethought, but I think it kept the League on an even keel. I shudder to think of the world we might have created otherwise.

What’s funny, is, in retrospect, what we ended up with was less like the UN and more like the League of Nations, and I’ll explain that. The UN is, by and large, “led” by the Security Council. Major, and especially priority, decisions are made through the council and not the secretariat. Our League is based on simple majorities; it’s true that I hold a position of relative leadership in the community, and there is a tendency for people to camp around the original founding members, but when it comes time to decide what we’re going to do, my voice is only as strong as the next man or woman’s. I think that’s eliminated a lot of potential strife, and helped us live up to the democratic ideals we’ve set for ourselves. I don’t aspire to inspiration, but I hope that, sometimes at least, we serve as an example people can and will follow.

ID: But in Darfur there are concrete things that could be done

S: And how far do we go? Do we tow the AU line, and try to wall off Darfur from the rest of Sudan? Do we go a step further, and smash the militias at the risk of destabilizing the entire country? Do we attack the military, the government, and potentially throw the whole region into conflict?

Everything we do has consequences. We've offered our, uh, services, I guess, to the Security Council, and, understandably, they're as reluctant as we are to intervene. The larger the response, the greater the chance for it to go catastrophically wrong, not to mention that using the Justice League could be seen as an escalation of an international superhuman arms race.

If the UN ever asks for our help, in Darfur or anywhere, we'll be there, but for now, they're trying to deal with the situation through traditional diplomacy. For better or worse, justice moves slowly.


We’ll be trying to bring you a new section of the interview every Monday. Some of the questions have already been prepared by the interviewer, but to ask Superman a question, leave a comment or send an email to DeathofSuperman@gmail.com.